Completed LoK last week. Just thinking about all villian philosophy.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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Wasn't Amon an Bloodbending gangster using a populist ideology to foment a rebellion? I don't think he was really "all about equality".
I'm hoping the op was purely going for comedic effect, cuz saying all three wanted "freedom and equality" is pretty far off the mark
Amon was hiding behind a message of "freedom and equality" in a blatant power grab, trying to establish himself as the only bender remaining, and thus nigh invincible
Unalaq didn't want "freedom and equality" - he was like the people who think we should fix global warming by killing all humans. His only redemption is that his extreme perspective was potentially heavily influenced by Vaatu, but that seems a bit of a stretch...
And while you could argue that Zaheer and the red lotus were for "freedom and equality", it was by equally murdering anyone they didn't like. Much like Kuvira, it was "I know better than everyone else, and thus must force my opinion on the rest of the world through rank violence."
And while I agree that Kuvira was an awful dictator and despot, comparing her to Hitler is overdoing it. Could she have gotten there if unchecked and given the correct pressures? Maybe. I highly doubt Hitler would ever have acknowledged his wrongdoing and tried to atone, though.
Yeah arguably the former three villains all sucked.
Amon was a criminal exploiting social unrest for his personal gain, and didn't really care about the cause.
Unalaq was the wuxia fantasy equivalent of an Ecofascist. "We are the virus" type shit
And Zaheer as an anarchist didn't really have a project or care about uniting the people, he just killed some powerful assholes and considered himself a hero for it, not even caring that killing a powerful asshole and fucking off basically just opens the door for other powerful assholes to do powerful asshole things. -- Which they did.
The telling part, to me, however, is that only Kuvira got a last minute redemption, where the other three fucking died. Because ultimately neoliberalism considers "violent warmongering and conquest (aka mostly it's the poors dying)" to be less destructive than social unrest, violent environmentalism, or anarchist movements that target the powerful.
Yea he was out for vengeance and gave no actual shits.